Metaverse Law, Cisco's New Plan, Conference Attendance
Fortnite raises $36 million?to aid Ukraine by donating a day’s game-play profits.?
April 21?| 4pm EDT | ZOOM?Earth Day: Events Edition?Mother Earth will thank you for taking a look at events, both digital and live, through the lens of environmental impact. Program speakers include?Sherry Huss,?Bob Priest-Heck,?Shawna McKinley,?Amanda Simons,?Jacqueline Tran?and?Heather Henderson Thomas. Each is doing remarkable things to change the environmental footprint of events.??RSVP??
1 Million Lawyers and Other Metaverse Disasters?
Just as in real life, the metaverse is going to make a lot of lawyers a lot of money. Let’s say you bought a Bored Ape NFT. Because you own the ape NFT, can you open a restaurant in its image? Could you make “Bored Ape: The Movie?” Clothing apparel? The?King of NFT marketing, Gary Vee, also opened a private dining membership club where you buy your NFT for entrance.?
Photo Credit: Andy Nguyen, Instagram??Chef Andy Nyguen is putting his ape (#6184 ) to work at his?new restaurant?
Elsewhere there’s a different kind of NFT IP battle. Hermes, maker of the iconic Birkin Hermes bag, is?suing?NFT creator?Mason Rothschild?for creating a Metabirkin. (They sell for anywhere from $10K to $40K.) The artist says he’s not ripping off the bag design, just creating an artistic representation. Birkin doesn’t agree. Did Andy Warhol need permission from Campbell’s Soup? We have real world precedent. Campbell’s Soup thought about suing but in the end decided it was good PR and sent Warhol a few cases of the good stuff.
This opens a can of worms as to whether NFTs are intellectual property. And it’s going to unleash a storm of antitrust cases, particularly around the topics of?interoperability and dominance.?
WebEx Events?Finally, a large company buys an answer to its problems and might not kill it in the process. (Think Microsoft and Skype as the archetypal example.) We met Yarkin Sakucoglu, CEO of Socio, way back at an?early VEG meeting. Around that time Socio was purchased by Cisco. Cisco’s in-house product was?WebEx, often loathed for its cumbersome onboarding process. Under Sakucoglu’s stewardship they had a baby and it’s called?WebEx Events. It looks really good and promises a soup to nuts enterprise-grade event environment for digital, live, and hybrid events. Interestingly, they surveyed their clients and created a picture of what 2022 will look like from an events perspective.
??Image credit: Webex Events.
Your Local Metaverse Banking Branch?
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Bankers are the latest to set up shop in the metaverse. Most prominently, at?JP Morgan's?salon in?Decentraland, which is called the?Onyx Lounge, you can be mildly entertained by a portrait of Jamie Dimon, a wandering tiger and a couple of displays talking about smart contracts and the blockchain.?HSBC?is staking a claim in the?Sandbox, where they are trying to lure a younger audience through game play and esports. It’s part marketing, part entertainment.
More interesting is?Zelf, which calls itself the first bank of the metaverse. According to this profile in?American Banker,??Zelf?is building an embedded banking system for exchanging value from virtual worlds to the real world, in conjunction with a bank account. It already offers embedded banking in messenger apps. In a typical scenario, a 17-year-old boy might have $2,000 in tokens inside a video game, but needs $50 in real-world dollars for a date with his girlfriend. Zelf would hold the game tokens in escrow and provide the player with a payday loan. If the person couldn’t repay, Zelf would sell the game tokens on its marketplace to other players to compensate for the loss. And if you’re wondering about how to pay for that land you grab in the metaverse, visit?TerraZero. It’s offering a “Metaverse Mortgage.”
Curated Reading?
Scuttlebutt???The 1/3 Rule?From where we’re sitting it looks as if overall attendance at large events is about 30-40% of pre-pandemic levels. Is that where it sticks? (We looked at?Game Developers Conference,?HIMSS,?CES,?Mobile World Congress?and?SXSW.?
??Shoptalk Back? One harbinger of spring is the return of Shoptalk (and Vegas in general). Shoptalk is the retail conference that went virtual for the last two years but is now projecting record attendance at this month’s events. —Morning Brew?
??A Seated Metaverse? Traditional event platforms are heading to the metaverse, too.?Allseated?raised 15 million to build out corporate metaverses.
??To all VEG membersWe’re beefing up the Jobs Board on our community website. Want a job? Have a job to fill? Post it on the?community job board?where finders and seekers share. And if you missed my NFT frenzy report from?SXSW you can read all about it